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Boomplaas Excavation Season 2024: HOMER Orientation

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HOMER Orientation!  Welcome to the first blog post from the Boomplaas 2024 Winter season! The group consists of numerous students from across the world including Brazil, Namibia, and Tanzania. We are beyond excited for the incredible opportunity to work in the field and to grow our knowledge base and skills in zooarchaeology, lithic analysis, and anthropological excavation. For this first week those of us here as part of the HOMER program have been going through orientation. The next 5 and a half weeks, we will be excavating the Boomplaas site. Orientation was based in Mossel Bay nestled within the Garden Route of South Africa, and we had the opportunity to visit multiple cave sites.  Our first day for HOMER orientation was Sunday May 11th, and here we are almost a week later on the 18th about to head inland to Boomplaas! To start Orientation we were introduced to the major find types we could expect to see at Boomplaas: faunal remains, lithics, and roofspall.    Students familiari
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Arma Veirana 2022 Season Post 10: Community

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 Ciao! Well, we've reached the end of our time here and our final blog post. It's hard to believe over a month has passed since we first arrived, it feels like time moves differently in this little corner of Italy. This past week, we students completed a preliminary analysis of the Mousterian layers of the cave and thousands of faunal specimens from 6 different stratigraphic aggregates. Some questions of interest were: which animals are represented in highest frequency and how does this differ between the layers? Where are the most densely butchered bones found? So far it is evident that bovids and cervids and long-bone elements were present and butchered the most. Also of interest to us was that each layer contained bear bones, except for one. The data and analyses will help drive future research questions and excavations to increase our knowledge and understanding of the habitation and use of Arma Veirana by Neandertals, modern humans, and other animals.   One of the most val
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Arma Veirana 2022 Season Post 9: Museums

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 We have officially finished coding all the faunal material and are working on preliminary analyses to get an overview of the Arma Veirana site and faunal specimens. Questions we are interested in asking are: What are the differences in the assemblages in each stratigraphic layer? What animals are represented and what skeletal elements make up the majority of each assemblage? What can this tell us about hominin use of the cave? While working on data analysis, we are also enjoying our final days in this special part of the world. We've had the privelege of traveling along the coast and visiting two fantastic museums. The first, the Museum of Prehistory at Balzi Rossi, is situated right along a massive cliff face that houses several paleolithic cave sites. An enthusiastic tour guide showed us around the museum, pointing out significant finds such as the skeletal remains of a female individual ("La Donna") who up until a decade ago was mislabeled as male, Mousterian lithics,
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Arma Veirana 2022 Season Post 8: Tutto Bene!

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Ciao friends! We have been hard at work in the lab this past week getting the final faunal remains coded into our system for further analysis, which we will begin shortly. The work has been extremely rewarding and humbling, looking through thousands of small animal bone fragments for hints of human and Neandertal influence such as cut marks and fire. As we continue to build our relationship with the local landscape and people, it becomes even more evident that this valley must have been a place of beauty, serenity, and shelter for ancient peoples and animals of all kinds for a long time. The sense of place is strong and it is easy to see why. We took two days off so Jamie, Caley, and Noor could travel to Nice to bring Nonna Deb to the airport, who graciously and with much energy provided 4 year-old Noor with entertainment and care for three weeks.  Now Noor plays sweetly in the lab while we work, entertaining us with her fantastic imagination 😊 During our two days off, we students to
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Arma Veirana 2022 Season Post 7: Caves and Beaches

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  Arene Candide We had the privelege of touring a significant archaeological site near Finale Ligure yesterday. Arene Candide is a remarkable cave with a 10 meter thick sequence of excavated sediment revealing artifacts and human remains from the Paleolithic to the Roman periods. After parking at the nearby train station, we hiked to the mouth of cave where our tour guide awaited us. We were shown throughout the excavated areas of the cave by a well-informed Italian guide. She explained the excavation methods utilized by archaeologists working within the cave, the various stratigraphic layers throughout the dig site, the different time periods in which artifacts and skeletal material were discovered, and the archaeological significance of the site in understanding the peopling of the Mediterranean in the Pleistocene and early Holocene. One of the most distinctive finds from Arene Candide is "the Prince", the 30,000 year-old burial of a 15 or 16 year-old male. "The Prince
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Arma Veirana 2022 Season Post 6: Paleolithic Meets Medieval

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With Babalola's arrival our team was assembled, so on Thursday we took the opportunity to visit Arma Veirana and see the site where the material we've been analyzing in the lab was excavated. To access the cave, you drive 10 minutes down the road from Erli to the quaint and peaceful town of Cerisola in the Piemonte region of Italy. As soon as we parked in Cericola we made a new friend! This adorable miniature pony greeted us and posed for a few pictures.   It is evident that the people of the Piemonte and Liguria region are proud of the archaeological work done in their valley at Arma Veirana. They have cleared the path leading down to the cave of thorny brambles, erected signage along the way, and built a bridge at the stream crossing.    After hiking down to the Neve stream, we trekked up the other side of the wooded valley until we reached the opening of Arma Veirana. We were all humbled and in awe at the beautiful cave. The vaulted ceilings and partially blocked entrance le
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